On Thursday, Donald Trump will have been been in office for six months, though it has felt longer. Since the inauguration, we’ve been treated to a near-daily deluge of scandals, ranging from the minor (does Trump know what century Frederick Douglass lived in?) to the more troubling (going to war with the press) to full-blown constitutional crisis territory (firing the director of the F.B.I., declaring attempted collusion with a foreign adversary “just politics,” and so on). The Republican Party, which controls both chambers of Congress, is in disarray, following the collapse of the G.O.P. health-care bill. And Democrats, for all their weaknesses, are seeing a flood of new congressional candidates ready to run against Trump in 2018.

Amazingly, things almost went another direction, one that could have resulted in the Trump presidency looking very different than it does today. According to reporter Joshua Green’s new book Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Democrats were initially worried that Trump might actually fulfill the populist promise of his campaign, shattering decades-long voting coalitions and ushering in a political realignment that could cement the G.O.P. as the party of working people for a generation. Key to the plan, as outlined by Bannon, was to combine a raft of nationalist policies—including restricting immigration and imposing tariffs—with a populist platform of increased government spending on military and infrastructure. The result, Bannon predicted, would make conservatives “go crazy,” forging an “economic nationalist movement” that would be “greater than the Reagan Revolution.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was among the Democrats worried that the administration would actually follow through with its pledge to make Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan its first big initiative, potentially driving a wedge through the party base between the “resistance” and blue-collar, union voters. “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let it happen,” he warned Bannon, according to Green’s book.

Of course, as it turns out, Schumer didn’t need to worry. For one, Trump decided instead to expend his initial political capital on a deeply divisive effort to ban immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S., sparking a major protest movement that effectively guaranteed he would not have meaningful Democratic support for the remainder of his presidency. For another, Trump severely miscalculated how difficult it would be to govern, leading him to make a number of political missteps. “I deal with people that are very extraordinarily talented people,” Trump told Green, per Axios. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn. I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away. It’s not even the same category. This”—politics—“is a category that’s like 19 levels lower. You understand what I’m saying? Brilliant killers.”

As Trump’s failure to pass any major legislation in his first six months in office proves, politics, like health care, turned out to be more “complicated” than he thought. His first infrastructure initiative, an unexciting measure to privatize the air-traffic control system—hardly the “revolution” Bannon anticipated—has already run into trouble in Congress, in what could end up being a major embarrassment for the administration. Instead of moving forward with the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment Trump promised, Republicans are back to squabbling over whether and how to keep the lights on when the government runs out of money this fall. If Schumer had known this is what Trump had up his sleeve, he wouldn’t have confronted Bannon about letting it happen.